album review

So here's how this week's review went down... I popped in the new album from Stormwitch, a band with which I was not familiar. I listened to it a couple of times, jotted down my thoughts and THEN moved on to the bands bio.

There is an old story in the worlds of physics and metaphysics (very different things, by the way) about a confrontation between a scientist and what we will call a layperson. They were debating the origin of the universe, when she proposes that the world sits atop the back of a giant turtle.

Let us take a moment to stop and ask a rather odd question: what is death metal? It seems sill to be asking such an existential question about a genre that is close to thirty years old, but I'm not sure anyone has ever figured out what the true essence of death metal is.

I've got some good news and bad news for fans of the Canadian metal band The Agonist. Lead singer and founding member Alissa White-Gluz has departed the group to take over lead vocalist duties for Arch Enemy. But I said there's good news!

I remember vividly getting involved in what turned into a very ugly argument over the musical skill of people involved in pop music. The majority opinion seemed to be that pop musicians must be unskilled hacks, because the music they made was so simple to play.

When the touring version of Thin Lizzy announced they were changing their name and releasing an all-new album, there was a huge buzz for the first new quasi-Lizzy music in a long, long time. That did not extend to me, however, as I had never been swept away as a fan of the band.

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.” – Groucho Marx

Beardfish is one of those prog bands that has gotten loads of priase during the course of their career, and again upon the release of their previous album, "The Void". While they are critically acclaimed as one of the leading purveyors of modern prog, I was less than enthused by that album.